25 Responses to “EconPop – The Economics of The LEGO Movie”

Communist Soviet Union? If you would take the time to actually see what the
USSR stands for you might notice some inconsistency in your claim. The
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a union of socialist republics. Not
a union of communes. It was a socialist regime.

The points in the video are valid in today’s society, but as we get better
at collecting, organizing, analyzing, and manipulating data, should we
eventually transfer to centralized planing? By the sound of this video, the
primary defense for plans by the many is that we just haven’t gotten good
enough at gathering and using data to do it from the top down, but I think
we’re already catching glimpses of analytics being able to preemptively
identify our needs, desires, and preferences.

I think we’re going to need support for free markets based on deeper
principals than simply the free market currently doing a better job than
the alternative if we want to keep that version of free will around.﻿

Is the fire department an example of central planning too? My taxes pay for
that. We couldn’t all, as individuals just get together and build
interstate highways. I wouldn’t want a private company to take over either
of these because I would like equal access to these service independent of
my income. In a completely free market one visit from the fire department
would cost $5,000,000.00 because of supply and demand. Oversight is
necessary. I think most people would agree that excessive oversight and
regulation is bad but you take it too far when you fail to acknowledge the
huge failures in this type of libertarian idealism. ﻿

However, free market economy is not without its faults, most notably short
sightedness. When dealing with areas such as environment, infrastructure
and energy, systems using only free market economy have failed miserably.
Therefore, central planning is needed to set standards and regulations
where within the free market actors can act. This is why Americans pay both
state and federal taxes.﻿

I’ve heard quite the opposite of The Lego Movie. Some people have claimed
that the movie was a stab at capitalism. That it has pro-Marxist
undertones. Stating the film portrays the working class, Proletariat
rebelling against their industrial overlords. Even Michael Moore praised it
for its supposed anti-capitalism themes. Even one of the film’s good guys
is Abraham Lincoln, Classical Liberals/Libertarians hate Lincoln. ﻿

The course down the road of tremendous intellectual oversimplification
goes strong as far as EconStories is concernrd.
In the absence of the last financial meltdown someone could be fooled
so as to actually take you seriously, however, experience should have
taught you how fragile our understanding of the nature of economics is. The
free market, as any other human mental construction, is ripe with
contradictions that we sooner or later face. In view of this fundamental
principle the annoying, even childish, persistence of yours to present your
ideological standpoint as a panacea, both obscures the complexity of the
problems that lie ahead and propagates a counterproductive dichotomy in
public dialogue.
A question that could be posed is does Supply and Demand function, in
the manner it does on Main Street, when we engage Wall Street in our
dialogue?
﻿

I really enjoy these videos, please do keep making them. My two problems
with this video, and libertarian economics in general:

1. It takes a single extreme case as representative of the whole in order
to paint all government functions in the worst possible light without
actually linking the two things in anything more than a vague resemblance
equating fascism/communism with paying the taxes that keep infrastructure
society needs running. Calling it a gift card to a store you don’t like is
a narrow, short-sighted view of what taxation really does, as much as it
sucks to not be a free-rider sometimes.

2. It completely sidesteps any evidence-based argument to prove the
existence of an Invisible Hand by calling it “emergent order” and
(ironically) hand-waving any potential objections aside. You might as well
call it “Intelligent Design”, or “a wizard did it” for all the actual
support presented for the idea that is supposed to be the thesis of the
presentation. If there really is some natural emergent order, where’s the
empirical data supporting this idea? Isn’t the fact that large crowds are
so often fallible, and sometimes catastrophically so, when it comes to so
many things?

If emergent order was actually a thing, or at least a thing that it was
wise to just let run free on its own, examples of pure democracy wouldn’t
produce such bad results so often. Think of a committee meeting you’ve sat
in where there was no leadership, agenda, or agreed upon purpose for the
meeting. It wasn’t a meeting at all, was it? No, it was at best a diverting
waste of time in a boring day, and at worst, some jackass hijacked things
and pushed loud and long for some monumentally bad idea that nobody else
cared enough to prevent.

Some order is a good thing and having someone at least nominally in charge
and responsible for things can produce much better results than letting
things spin out as they may.Throwing out the proven track record of limited
control as identical with a command economy is an absurd
mischaracterization. Yes, there are problems and abuses within governments,
but these things are also in corporations, citizens’ organizations, and any
other place you find people gathering in groups.

America’s anarcho-libertarians are so desperate for attention and
credibility that they see “libertarianism” under every rock. “The
Incredibles” (according to anarcho-libertarians) is a “libertarian” film.
So is “Starship Troopers,” “Bananas,” “Breaker Morant” and “The Godfather.”
Sheesh. No wonder nobody takes libertarians seriously.﻿